Lawsuit: Wikipedia fired transgender worker who complained about harassment

A former Wikipedia employee claims her direct report, Dennis Mbuguru (pictured), harassed her to the point that she was fired. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons, Graphic by The Desk)

A former employee of Wikipedia’s parent company has filed a federal lawsuit alleging she was fired after reporting her direct supervisor for gender discrimination and harassment.

The woman, Kayla Mae, was hired by the Wikimedia Foundation in November 2022, where she worked as a software engineer for nearly two years.

Her role allowed her to work remotely from Texas, and she was assigned to work on a team managed by Dennis Mburugu, a Wikimedia employee based in Kenya.

Within the first few months of her employment, she encountered problems with Mburugu, according to her complaint. Among other things, Mburugu asked her inappropriate questions about her sexual identity — she is a transgender female — and inquired about her medical history, Mae wrote in the complaint.

In February 2023, Mae brought up the issue with Wikimedia Foundation’s human resources department, who launched an investigation and “ultimately determined that Mburugu’s actions were inappropriate” and a violation of the organization’s policy, she said.

It wasn’t clear what action, if any, Wikimedia took against Mburugu, but he continued to work for the organization, and Mae continued to report to him. The situation became so problematic that Mae asked to be transferred to another team.

In an email sent to Tatiana Tompkins and DeJa Hamilton, Mae claimed that Mburugu was engaged in “transphobic microaggressions” and “ableism,” with the latter referring to her diagnosis as neurodivergent. She wrote that the situation made her “dread work.”

Rather than immediately move Mae to another team, Hamilton reportedly emailed back, denying the request but asking to speak with Mae so that Wikimedia could “learn more about your recent experiences.”

One week later, Mae met with Hamilton, Tompkins and a senior software engineering manager named Sai Suman Cherukwada, the complaint says. During the meeting, Mae affirmed Mburugu’s behavior ad not improved. Shortly after that statement, Cherukwada fired Mae, she alleges.

A few months later, Mae filed a discrimination complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Mae alleged her firing was based on her gender identity and disability. Earlier this year, the agency mailed her a Notice of Right to Sue letter, which paved the way for her lawsuit.

Mae says she was qualified to work in the role, and that Wikimedia was unjustified in terminating her employment. She also accuses Wikimedia of acting maliciously with respect to its decision to fire her, which she claims violates her federally-protected rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Wikimedia continues to employ Mburugu: A biography on the organization’s website says he is “an engineering manager on the Growth Team,” which is tasked with recruiting and retaining new volunteer editors for Wikipedia and other websites. Hamilton, Tompkins and Cherukwada are still Wikimedia employees as well, according to their LinkedIn pages.

Mae is seeking back pay, loss of wages and benefits, and court-related costs. She is also asking for compensation for “mental anguish and emotional distress in the past and future,” as well as compensatory damages, and has demanded a jury trial.

It was not clear if Wikimedia had been served a copy of the complaint, which was filed late last month. A Wikimedia spokesperson has not returned a request for comment. Mburugu did not respond to an e-mail sent late Wednesday evening.

Wikimedia Foundation is the operator of Wikipedia, one of the largest and most-visited websites on the Internet. Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation have been the subject of numerous articles and reports about harassment committed by some of its unpaid volunteers, including a 2019 profile in the New York Times that claimed a transgender volunteer was “persistently hit with personal attacks” by other editors. In one case, a Wikipedia volunteer posted the “dead name,” or pre-transition government identity, of the victim, the Times reported.

Two years before the story, a report commissioned by Wikimedia itself revealed identified volunteer Wikipedia editors — those who use their real name or another identity that can be linked to an actual person — were responsible for nearly 10 percent of all harassment and abuse on the platform. (Wikimedia does not require a person to provide their real name, or even register an account, in order to edit or update Wikipedia pages.)

In response to those reports, officials at Wikimedia vowed more transparency and accountability, and implemented various policies in an effort to welcome new editors with diverse backgrounds and points of view. But the organization has failed to curb similar abuses committed by its own employees and contractors, according to current and former workers.

Anecdotes posted to Wikimedia’s listing on the website Glassdoor paint a picture of an organization that touts diversity and equity in its employment and promotional practices. But some current and former Wikimedia staffers say those initiatives are simply meant to curry favor with progressive-minded donors, and that Wikimedia’s executives and senior managers fail to follow or enforce them.

Glassdoor says it doesn’t verify the employment of its website users, and can’t authenticate the “truthfulness of their contributions or their employment status.” But the website date-stamps all reviews posted online, and Wikimedia’s profile is littered with complaints about hostile workplace conditions and failures to curb internal abuse. Some of the posts are more than a decade old.

In 2022, a former software engineer based in San Francisco complained Wikimedia managers “actively try to make you fail,” and that internal meetings “can get very tense due to hostile behavior.”

“Some technical teams have a long and well documented history of bullying, too,” the worker wrote.

Two months earlier, another employee wrote that the Wikimedia Foundation “does not care about DEI (diversity, equity and inclusiveness) or BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) experiences.”

“Where is HR?” the worker questioned. “There is no support staff, and (Wikimedia Foundation) won’t stand up to leadership’s bad behavior and toxic culture. Managers desperately need to be trained.”

Mae was hired in the period between the two posts. Things didn’t improve during her time there, or after she was fired, according to other anecdotes.

In April 2023, a former employee wrote that Wikimedia Foundation was a “very political environment, with unclear processes and decision-making.” The following year — shortly after Mae was fired — another worker claimed that Wikimedia had “toxic leadership at the highest levels.”

“It’s shocking that, for a mission-driven org, they seem to lack personal morals,” the staffer alleged. “It’s the most political place I’ve ever worked.”